Unagi (1997) Reviews

• A many-stranded film of contrasts and great beauty

  snaunton2000-02-06

  This complex and beautiful film is built on correspondences and contrasts; between landscape and society, man and nature, between passive and active, death and life, sanity and madness, the repressed and the unbridled, sexuality and abstinence, comedy and tragedy, alienation and redemption. The many strands to these themes are woven together in a complex pattern that defies complete analysis. Yet 'The Eel' is well-paced and is easy to watch and enjoy. The film is set in Japan, that most self-disciplined and compliant of countries, and it is the limits, and limitations, of conformity and control that are explored. Behaviour is checked, emotions kept inward; yet when people look inward they find a seething that terrifies. The landscape here is a damp, featureless, washed-out coastland, exquisitely shot in a subdued palette that embodies the film's subject. The people, too, are generally quiet, gentle, good citizens. Yet violence and disturbance erupt into their lives as norms are broken: a woman makes love, intensely, exultantly, adulterously. Her husband discovers her and stabs her to death in the very act. After eight years in prison Yamashita is released on parole, alienated and withdrawn, and, accompanied by his eel companion, opens a barber's shop. He finds Keiko, unconscious after a suicide attempt, and she begins to work for him. She, too, is on conditional release, from her crazy mother and unpleasant extortionist boyfriend. There is an immediate sympathy between Yamashita and Keiko, a sympathy that he, especially, cannot bring himself to express, driven to repression and passivity by his guilt and fear. Each of these principal characters correspond with other characters in the film, providing a network of symmetry and contrast. Thus, Yamashita's failure to express his yearning for Keiko is set against Dojima's earlier lovemaking with her, and a fellow ex-convict's attempted rape. The ex-con haunts Yamashita, taunting him with his weaknesses, until he is transformed into a phantasm of Yamashita's imagination. Yamashita's wife's affair, too, finds resonance in Keiko's sensuality - and in both women's determination to provide a lunch box whenever Yamashita goes fishing. At the end, the man volunteers to assume paternity of Keiko's unborn child by Dojima. Attempts by minor characters in the film to reach out beyond febrile compliance and quietism provide humour but little comfort: Keiko's mother's Spanish dancing is but a manifestation of her madness, and Yamashita's friend seeks only the unattainable and absurd, in his obsession with contacting UFOs. The moments of irony and humour are generally introduced with a light touch, but the transition is less satisfactory in the climactic fight at the barber's shop. This crucial moment in the film, when Yamashita fights Dojima and his thugs, against her past and his, is filmed as slapstick; the humour in unnerving. In the end there is redemption, but the contrast of the conventional with the unruly is resolved, once more, quietly, almost submissively. Yamashita, his parole broken, returns to gaol for a year; Keiko waits for the birth of her child and Yamashita's release. Harmony is restored - on the surface. The eel, at last, is released. 'The Eel' is a subtle and complex film, with a succession of images that require more than one viewing and more than this brief note to tease out. But doing so will be a rewarding experience. Imamura's film is strong and subtle, warm yet critical. It will reward many viewings.

• Doesn't come together as a satisfying whole

  howard.schumann2004-11-15

  Takura Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) has served eight years in prison for murdering his wife and her lover in a jealous rage and attempts to rehabilitate himself by opening a barbershop in an isolated corner of Japan. His past, however, catches up with him in Shohei Imamura's The Eel, co-winner of the 1997 Cannes Palme D'or with Kiarostami's A Taste of Cherry. Based on the Akira Yoshimura's novel Sparkles in the Darkness, The Eel is either an absurdist comedy, a drama about redemption, a surreal poem about states of consciousness, a thriller about jealousy and revenge, or all of the above. As the film opens, Yamashita, a worker at a large flour company, is startled to read an anonymous letter on the train coming home from work informing him that his wife cheats on him when he goes away on overnight fishing trips. Cutting one of his trips short, he returns home in the middle of the night to find his wife Emiko (Chiho Terada) in bed with a lover. Grabbing a butcher knife, he brutally stabs both of them to death then calmly rides his bicycle to the local police station and turns himself in. After eight years in prison, he is released and paroled to an elderly Buddhist priest. Alienated and afraid, Yamashita's only companion is a pet eel whom he confides in ("he listens to what I say"). He opens a barbershop in a rural part of Japan but his life becomes complicated after he saves a young woman, Keiko (Misa Shimizu), from suicide and gives her a job at his shop. Reminded of his former wife, Yamashita avoids intimacy but she is drawn to him nonetheless and offers him box lunches when he goes fishing. In spite of trying to keep his distance, Yamashita attracts some local characters that move the plot in a different direction. These include a young man who borrows his barber pole to attract UFOs, a fishing buddy who designs a device to catch eels without harming them, and his former prison mate, Tamotsu Takasaki (Akira Emoto), a foul-mouthed drunk who recites Buddhist Sutras and reminds him of his previous acts. The story, which until now has had a rich dramatic arc, soon descends into forced comedy when Keiko's mentally-challenged mother shows up doing flamenco dances and Keiko's former boyfriend returns demanding her mother's money. The townspeople and semi-gangster associates of the boyfriend join in a final free-for-all at the barbershop that might have been lifted from the Three Stooges. The Eel is at times a brilliant and involving character study about a man seeking to turn his life around. At other times, however, it is a discordant conglomeration of plots and subplots, one-dimensional characters, and heavy symbolism relieved only by wooden farce. The UFO sequence is very lame and the comic behavior of a man just out of prison seems inappropriate as he marches like a soldier then runs after a jogging team that is passing by. Imamura has said, "If my films are messy, this is probably due to the fact that I don't like too perfect a cinema." I know that things are not always neat and our lives are often a blend of drama and farce, but The Eel's odd mixture of quirky characters and widely disparate elements keeps it from coming together as a satisfying whole.

• Exploring the Inner Turmoil of the Outwardly Placid Mind

  gradyharp2005-05-18

  Guilt and Redemption are the pervasive themes of this quirky, disturbing, very fine film from Shohei Imamura. The consequences of the instantaneous loss of control molds this story in the way such life happenstances unfold - slowly - and Imamura knows how to take us with him in this strange tale, pausing here and there for the surreal, dreamlike sequences that can and do alter our perceptions of reality. Takuro Yamashita (Kôji Yakusho) is a quietly married blue-collar worker who spends some evenings fishing for sport and food, his passive wife Emiko (Chiho Terada) sending him off with boxed lunches. Takuro receives an anonymous letter that states his wife is having an affair while he slips away to fish. Incredulous, Takuro returns early form his nocturnal fishing to find his wife engaged in passionate sex and Takuro stabs her to death, then bicycles to the police station and turns himself in for the murder of Emiko. He is imprisoned for eight years and conforms to the rigid life of the incarcerated, his only companion is a pet eel with whom he feels he can communicate. Upon release from prison, Takuro is placed under the supervision of a kindly priest who helps him start a barbershop, living a quiet secluded life, his only friends being his pet eel and a strange character who has set up a field station to attract friendly aliens from outer space! All is calm until he encounters Keiko (Misa Shimizu) who closely resembles his murdered wife and indeed is suicidal from her own slashes in an attempt to negate the genetic threat of her mentally disturbed mother and her own consignation with an underworld lover Eiji Dojima (Tomorowo Taguchi), a man who holds her under his control to gain the mad mother's money committed to his evil schemes. Takuro saves Keiko from her suicide attempt and the priest encourages him to take on Keiko as an assistant. The barbershop does well and Takuro and Keiko make good business partners. Takuro is emotionally dead over his guilt for the murder of his wife and refuses to entertain the idea of opening himself to Keiko's loving advances. There are too many similarities between the dead Emiko and the frightened Keiko. Yet when all of the forces collide in the climax of the film, Takuro realizes how much of his past is mixed with fantasy/nightmare and, equally, how much his present is dependent on his interaction with Keiko (now pregnant with Dojima's baby), the priest, his sci-fi friend and the forces who would destroy Keiko and his quiet existence. The ending, somewhat marred by a keystone kops like fight, reveals the cracks in Takuro's mental armor and the possibility for redemption unfolds in a tender way. There are many levels of interpretation to this fable and to explore each of them would rob the first-time viewer of this little film of the pleasure of the chess game Imamura sets for us. The acting is solid, the night scenes are lovely, and the day scenes are as visually chaotic as the real world in which we live. There could be improvements in the editing, definitely in the musical score and in the camera work. But those are minor blemishes in this film that engages the mind in the challenge of entering a new mode of thought. A strange little film, this, and not for everyone. Grady Harp

• Abstract drama at it's best!

  MOONboy2000-05-03

  I tried to spoil my girlfriend, who studies Japanese culture, with a film and it worked! Unagi (the Eal) tells a story of man who commits a 'crime passionelle' by murdering his wife. When he leaves prison the guards bring him 'his' eal. Under supervision of a local priest he tries to live a peaceful peasant-life in a place where nobody knows about his past; he becomes a barber, the eal is his friend ('they never say things you don't like..'). The situation changes when, on instigation of the priest, a girl starts assisting him in his shop. Inevitable his dilemma's come back... I loved this film for it reminded me much of the films of the Dutch director/producer Alex van Warmerdam; the ordinary, tightly directed up to every detail, the sufficating dilemma's lightly woven thru. Modern drama at it's best!

• redemption,the chaotic path

  room3371999-08-15

  I actually enjoyed the film a lot. Maybe it's not one of the most articulated films, but there was liveliness in it,and i think that's the reason the eel got cannes. The lives of misunderstood,isolated finds the peace with themselves in a remote country side, reminded me of Mediterriano a bit. The man's murder, suicidal heroine and her mad mother, a guy who is obsessed with UFO, which seems unexplainable and their lives are narrated in a messiest possible way. I think this film is not for analysis or for coming to conclusion, the director wants to show a utopia where misfits can be forgiven and find a harmony with the world, where a human communicates with an eel. And where people can have a chance to get redemption,,,